by Colin Wilson
The original mapmaker had been a Turkish pirate named Piri Re’is (Re’is means “admiral”), who had been beheaded in 1554. He had been the nephew of a famous pirate, Kemal Re’is, and had held a high post, equivalent to the governorship of Egypt. Piri Re’is had made the interesting statement that he had based his map on twenty old maps, one of them made by Christopher Columbus and others from the great library of Alexandria, destroyed by invading Arabs in AD 640.
In fact, the Piri Re’is map had been known since 1929, when it had been discovered in the Topkapi Palace museum in Istanbul, and there was already a copy in the Library of Congress. But thus far, no one had paid much attention to it. Walters decided to try and remedy that and showed the map to his friend, Captain Arlington H. Mallery, a navigator who was devoting his retirement to studying old maps. Mallery was allowed to borrow the map, and when he brought it back, he had some startling – indeed, incredible – comments. Mallery agreed that the land shown to the south was Antarctica; what was more, the map had apparently been made before the Antarctic continent was covered with ice. But that seemed absurd. The coast of Antarctica had certainly been covered with ice in the time of Alexander the Great; the last time men could have seen it without ice was many thousands of years ago, long before the earliest known maritime civilizations. And that could only mean one of two things: either that ships had sailed the seas at a time when, according to historians, our ancestors were living in caves, or – what sounded equally outrageous – that there had once been a flourishing civilization on Antarctica itself, whose men made maps that were copied down through the ages, up to the time of Alexander the Great.
These suggestions caused considerable controversy, which came to Hapgood’s attention. He was interested because it sounded as if the Piri Re’is map might support some of the conclusions he had drawn about the movements of the earth’s crust – and would publish in a book entitled Earth’s Shifting Crust in 1958. Hapgood’s starting point had been the puzzle of the great ice ages, which are still unexplained by science. Hapgood’s own suggestion was that, for some unknown reason, the amount of sunlight varies from age to age. Ice caps form unevenly at the poles, and this lack of balance affects the rotation of the earth – just as an off-balance wheel begins to vibrate as it spins. This, Hapgood suggested, causes masses of ice to dislodge, as well as the tectonic plates to which they are stuck. And the movement of these plates causes a catastrophic shake-up of the earth’s crust. Hapgood estimated that the last such catastrophic movement took place between ten and fifteen thousand years ago. Before that, he suggested, Antarctica was 2,500 miles closer to the equator than it is today and had a temperate climate. Albert Einstein wrote an introduction to the book, in which he declared that Hapgood’s theories deserved careful attention.
When Hapgood learned of Mallery’s views on the Piri Re’is map, he decided that, instead of arguing about whether it was genuine, it would be more sensible to subject it to careful, detailed study. He therefore assembled a group of students at Keene State College in New Hampshire and set them the task of studying a number of ancient maps, including that of Piri Re’is.
Hapgood’s first surprise was that the maps known as portolans – those used by seafarers in the Middle Ages (the word means “from port to port”) – had been known to scholars for centuries and that no one had paid much attention to them, even though some showed, for example, that Cuba had been known before Columbus “discovered” it in 1492. His next surprise was that these portolans were often as accurate as modern maps. It seemed odd that land-based mapmakers should have been content with crudities when their marine counterparts were so sophisticated.
Hapgood also noted that A. E. Nordenskiold, a leading scholar whose study of early maps had appeared in 1889, believed that the portolans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were based on far older maps that dated back centuries before Christ. One of Nordenskiold’s main reasons for this belief was that the great geographer and astronomer Ptolemy, who was active in Alexandria around AD 150, made maps that were less accurate than these medieval portolans, even though he had the greatest library in the world at his disposal. Was it likely that ordinary medieval seamen, working by rule of thumb, could surpass Ptolemy unless they had some ancient maps to guide them?
The arguments Hapgood uses to support this thesis, based on the research of his students, are too long and too technical to describe at length here. But one thing that was obvious was that although Piri had combined the twenty maps he admitted using to the best of his ability, he had often allowed them to overlap – or fail to overlap. He had shown the Amazon river twice but had left out a nine-hundred-mile stretch of the coastline. The problem was to try to understand how these errors had come about.
One error could be pinned down to the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes, the first man to calculate the size of the earth with accuracy. He knew that on June 21 the sun at midday was reflected in a certain well in Syene, on the Nile, and that towers did not cast a shadow. But in Alexandria, they did. He had only to measure the length of the shadow of a tower in Alexandria at midday on June 21 to calculate the angle of the sun’s rays. This proved to be 7 degrees. Since he knew the distance from Syene to Alexandria, he could easily work out how many miles were required for 360 degrees. Due to a miscalculation of distance, Eratosthenes increased the circumference of the earth by about 4½ degrees; but it was an amazingly accurate calculation for 240 BC. Hapgood discovered that if he allowed for this 4½ degree error, Piri’s map became even more accurate. This was an additional piece of evidence that Piri’s map was based on ancient Greek models.
Another problem is the obvious one known to all geographers – that the earth is a sphere, and a map that is flat is bound to distort it. Today mapmakers use a “projection” based on division into latitude and longitude. But the old mapmakers, it seemed, used a simpler method. They chose a centre, drew a circle around it, then subdivided this into sixteen segments, much like dividing a cake into sixteen slices. Along the outer edge of every “slice” they drew various squares – a complicated method, but one that worked well enough. The original centre of the Piri Re’is map was actually off the map, but calculation indicated that it had to be in Egypt. At first, Alexandria seemed the obvious place. But more careful calculation showed that the place had to be further north. When it turned out to be Syene, Hapgood knew he was on the right track.
But this in itself, Hapgood realized, had some interesting implications. When the geographers of Alexandria made their maps – which included Eratosthenes’s 4½ degree error – it is unlikely that they sailed off to visit the various places they were mapping. They presumably used older maps. And those older maps must have been incredibly accurate – without the 4½ degree error. This suggests that the older mapmakers possessed a more accurate and advanced mapmaking science than the Greeks.
In fact, there is one interesting piece of evidence that this is so. Toward the end of the second century BC the Greek grammarian Agatharchides of Cnidus, who was a tutor to one of the Ptolemy kings of Egypt, was told that, according to ancient tradition, one side of the base of the Great Pyramid – built around 2500 BC – was precisely one-eighth of a minute of a degree in length – that is, it was that part of the earth’s circumference. (A minute is a sixtieth of a degree.) The pyramid’s base is just over 230 meters. If 230 is multiplied by 8, then by 60, then by 360, the result is just under foty thousand kilometers, or just under twenty-five thousand miles – a remarkably accurate estimate of the length of the equator. Now it is possible, of course, that whoever designed the pyramid chose the length of its base at random and that some later geographer, after Eratosthenes, worked out that it was an eighth of a minute. But our knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, and the importance they attached to sacred geometry, suggests that they knew exactly what they were doing – and that they knew the circumference of the earth in 2500 BC.
When Napoléon invaded Egypt in 1798, one of the learned men he took along with him, Edmé François Jomard
, studied the Great Pyramid carefully and made some important discoveries: The four sides of the pyramid point to the four points of the compass – north, south, east, and west – with incredible accuracy. The pyramid is ten miles from Cairo, which is at the base of the Nile Delta – so called because it is a triangle of streams running into the sea – and if diagonals are drawn from the pyramid, they neatly enclose the delta. Moreover, a line drawn from exactly halfway along the north face slices the delta into two exact halves. All of these facts indicate that the ancient Egyptians had some extremely precise method of measuring long distances and did not do it by rough guesswork.
The French meter is supposed to be precisely one ten-millionth of the distance from equator to pole. Jomard’s study of the pyramid convinced him that the Egyptians had also used a measure based on the earth’s size – in this case, 1 divided by 216,000.
All of this is staggering. How could a fairly primitive agricultural civilization know the size of the earth? What is equally hard to understand is why this knowledge had to be rediscovered by Eratosthenes more than two thousand years later – until we recall that until Columbus sailed to America, there was a general belief that the earth is flat. Knowledge can be lost very easily.
Hapgood made another interesting discovery from his study of the Piri Re’is map: that the original maps from which it was drawn must have used a slightly different length for the degree of latitude than the degree of longitude. Why? Well, presumably because if you are trying to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat sheet of paper, the lines of longitude get shorter as they draw toward the poles, while the lines of latitude (since they run parallel across the globe) are less affected. The first European to use this projection method was Gerardus Mercator, in 1569. It looked as if the ancient mapmakers had already used the same method.
Hapgood concluded that the “evident knowledge of longitude implies a people unknown to us, a nation of seafarers, with instruments for finding longitude undreamed of by the Greeks.”
What was equally impressive was Hapgood’s confirmation of Mallery’s conclusion that the coast of Queen Maud Land, on the Antarctic continent, had been drawn without the ice sheets. In 1949 an expedition mounted by Norway, Britain, and Sweden was able to establish the outline of the land under the ice by various sophisticated techniques for taking depth soundings through the ice caps. This indicated that Piri Re’is probably based his map on some original map of the Antarctic before the Ice Age – which, as we recall, Hapgood had placed (in Earth’s Shifting Crust) between ten and fifteen thousand years ago.
The Piri Re’is map was not the only one examined by Hapgood and his students. Hapgood asked the Library of Congress to allow him to look at all the old maps of the period and was startled to find hundreds of them laid out for his inspection. It was a 1531 map by one Oronteus Finaeus that filled him with a conviction that he had made a discovery equal in importance to the Piri Re’is map. It showed the South Pole – which was amazing enough for a date nearly three centuries before its official discovery. What was positively staggering was that it was a map of the whole polar cap, as if drawn from the air, showing a remarkable resemblance to the pole as we know it today. And again, all the evidence suggested that it had been made in the days before the pole was covered with ice – it, too, showed the coast of Queen Maud Land and mountain ranges now under the ice, as well as rivers flowing into the sea. Certain mistakes on the map reappeared in all other contemporary maps, suggesting that all of them had been based on some old map, possibly dating back to Alexander the Great. But the 1949 core samples left no doubt that the Antarctic was covered with ice at the time of Alexander the Great (356–23 BC). So the original maps must have been much older.
How much older? The core samples showed that the last warm period in the Antarctic ended six thousand years ago, or around 4000 BC, so the “Antarctic civilization” posited by Hapgood must have flourished before this. Now this, in itself, is not particularly astonishing. Man was fishing ten thousand years ago and began to farm soon after that. Jericho, the oldest market town so far discovered, was fortified between eight and ten thousand years ago, and its inhabitants used polished limestone dishes because they had not yet learned to bake pottery. On the other hand, writing was not invented until about 3500 BC, in Sumeria. Domestication of camels and donkeys was to cause an expansion in trade about five hundred years later. So the Oronteus Finaeus map suggested that some kind of writing – because it is hard to conceive of a map without “labels” – must have existed nearly three thousand years earlier. Besides, mapmaking is a sophisticated science requiring, among other things, some knowledge of geometry – and the earliest knowledge of geometry seems to date from Babylon about 1500 BC, nearly five thousand years later than the “Antarctic civilization.”
A Turkish Hadji Ahmed map of 1550 (fourteen years before the birth of Shakespeare) shows the world from a northern “projection,” as if hovering over the North Pole. Again, the accuracy is incredible. But what may be its most interesting feature is that Alaska and Siberia seem to be joined. Since this projection shows a heart-shaped globe, with Alaska on one side of the “dimple” and Siberia on the other, this could merely indicate that the map-maker did not have enough space to show the Bering Strait which divides the continents. If this is not so, the consequences are staggering: we know that a land bridge did exist in the remote past, but it may have been as long as 12,000 years ago.
Other early portolans were equally remarkable for their accuracy. The “Dulcert Portolano” of 1339, for example, shows that the cartographer had precise knowledge of an area from Galway to the Don Basin in Russia. Others showed the Aegean dotted with islands that do not now exist – they were presumably drowned by melting ice; an accurately drawn map of southern Great Britain, but without Scotland and with indications of glaciers; and a Sweden still partially glaciated.
Perhaps the most interesting piece of evidence uncovered by Hapgood is a map of China that he found in Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, dating from AD 1137 and carved in stone. Hapgood’s studies of Piri Re’is and other European portolans had made him familiar with the “longitude error” mentioned above; now he was astonished to find it on this map of China. If he was correct, then the Chinese had also known the “original” maps on which Piri Re’is’s map was based.
And this, of course, suggested the staggering idea that some worldwide seafaring civilization had existed before Alexander the Great and that it had disappeared while the civilization of Mesopotamia was still primitive and illiterate. This is the suggestion that Hapgood – shunning all academic caution – outlines in his book’s last chapter, “A Civilisation That Vanished.” He points out that we had to wait for the eighteenth century to develop an accurate method of measuring longitude and the circumference of the earth, and until the nineteenth for the exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic. According to Hapgood: “The maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things.” And this civilization disappeared, either in some catastrophe or over a long period of time, and was simply forgotten. If it existed in Antarctica – and possibly the Arctic – then its disappearance is easily explained by the return of the ice cap about six thousand years ago.
And what does all this mean? Hapgood was content simply to postulate a maritime civilization that sailed the seven seas when, according to historians, the only seafarers were fishermen who hugged the coasts of the Mediterranean. But others were anxious to dot the is and cross the ts. They saw his “advanced civilization of the Ice Age” as a proof of the real existence of Atlantis, supposedly destroyed in some great prehistoric catastrophe, while others seized upon it as proof that the earth had been visited by “spacemen” at some remote epoch in the past. The “ancient astronaut” theory (see chapter 14) was popularized in books like The Morning of the Magicians (1960) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, and Chariots of the Gods? (1957) by Erich von Däniken. All these speculations – popularized in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odysse
y – had the same effect on the scientists of the 1960s that the Spiritualist explosion of the 1860s had on their nineteenth-century predecessors. Serious inquiry was underminded by “guilt by association.” Hapgood ceased to be taken seriously, even by a minority of his fellow academics.
In 1979 a revised edition of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilisation in the Ice Age made reviewers aware that Hapgood did not deserve to be tarred with the same brush as von Däniken. It is perfectly conceivable that some of his arguments may prove to be false and that the mistakes of unskilled mapmakers may explain the extra islands in the Aegean, the missing upper half of England, the mid-Atlantic ridge, and even the land bridge across the Bering Strait. But his main argument remains unaffected. Portolans of the Middle Ages show Antarctica long before it was explored, and the skill with which they are drawn suggests that they are based on far older maps. Perhaps the resemblance between the Chinese map of 1137 and the portolans is coincidence, and there was no “worldwide maritime civilization.” But at the very least, there must have been some fairly sophisticated civilization long before the so-called birth of civilization in Mesopotamia or China – perhaps buried beneath Antarctic ice.
Hapgood is inclined to undermine his own case with specious arguments. For example, he points out that in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Swift gives a strangely accurate description of the two moons of Mars, which were not discovered for another century and a half. Hapgood suggests that Swift was relying on “some ancient source,” when the true explanation is probably the curious serendipity that can be found so often in the history of art and literature. (I point out in my book Starseekers that in Eureka, Poe anticipated the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, as well as the discovery that atoms can be broken down into positive and negative particles.) In other words, we are dealing with something closer to Jung’s “synchronicity.”